Analysis: the flaws in General McChrystal's strategy

More troops might stop Nato failing in Afghanistan, but they certainly won’t guarantee victory.

General Stanley McChrystal’s new counterinsurgency plan relies on seizing the initiative and reversing “insurgent momentum,” which has seen violence spread across parts of the country thought of as safe just a few months ago.

More troops will help him do that. But security is only one part of the problem. While more boots on the ground will let General McChrystal better execute a doctrine of “protecting the people” rather than hunting down Taleban or controlling territory, soldiers alone can’t solve the cancerous government corruption, nor the woeful state of rural development.

A senior Western doplomat said: “The strategy Nato has come up with is a military strategy which references governance and development. But we’ve got to come up with a political strategy to address the unpopularity of the government, which is a driving force for the insurgency.” People giddy with optimism in 2001, when the Taleban fell, have grown weary of broken promises, civilian casualties and a government that steals everything from road tolls to elections.

President Barack Obama’s surge earlier this summer gave Nato’s International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) a renewed sense of momentum. But so far the results have been limited.

More than 8,000 US Marines stormed into southern Helmand in June, freeing British troops to launch the deadliest operation of the modern Afghan campaign.

Operation Panther’s Claw, just a few miles north of their Helmand headquarters, exacted the bloodiest day, in the bloodiest week, in the bloodiest month since 2001. The offensive was designed to secure one of the province’s most populous areas ahead of the elections on August 20. Yet on polling day, in Babaji, only 150 people came out to vote.

Arguably, it is too early too see the impact of the uplift in Helmand. After years of bloody sweep operations that saw British troops descend on an area, flush the Taleban away and then leave, only for the insurgents to filter back in, locals are understandably sceptical of their promise to stay this time. Commanders insist they will stay until the Afghan security forces are strong enough to take over.

No one seems to know when that might be. Training the Afghan army has been one of the few tangible successes since 2001. But the army is still well short of its 134,000 target and largely incapable of operating without Nato support. The police force is widely derided as a bunch of uniformed thieves and heroin addicts.

Bolstering the Afghan forces is central to Nato’s exit strategy. But without a legitimate government in Kabul neither Nato nor the Afghan security forces will have any kind of meaningful mandate.

The problems stem from decisions at the Bonn Conference in 2001 to empower the many warlords and criminals whose unpopularity helped the Taleban to power in the mid 1990s.

A UK diplomat said: "There's no doubt we have invested a lot of money in a project and that project has been robbed. The history of our presence in Afghanistan is that we have let mafioso types in government rob, and rob again. We are empowering the worst elements of their society. We are basically rewarding vice. It can't be allowed to go unpunished."

More than a third of President Hamid Karzai’s three million votes have triggered fraud alerts. Officials are now wading through more than 2,700 allegations of ballot-box stuffing, police intimidation and phantom polling stations in a bid to claw back some semblance of credibility.

General McChrystal’s report recognises this: "The weakness of state institutions, malign actions of power-brokers, widespread corruption and abuse of power by various officials, and ISAF's own errors, have given Afghans little reason to support their government."

But Nato’s mandate is to support the Government of Afghanistan. Unless that government is worth supporting, the mission here is doomed.

Posted in: World News